Bowie's Outside: C or D?

The only bad thing I have to say about Outside is that it’s a shame this perfect album is interrupted by “Hallo Spaceboy” but the ffwd button is right there, so, 10/10

Whaaat? I love "Hallo Spaceboy" and the PSB remix

Can't believe how long it took me to discover Outside. I had enjoyed some of his more well-known albums for years but... I mean, it's a big catalog to listen to everything. now the album is possibly my favorite of his

I've never heard The Buddha of Suburbia and I wonder if it's at all like Outside.

Not at all. Bowie and Erdil Kizilkay playing and writing cool noodles and instrumentals.

POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR

dunce

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, June 12, 2017 6:55 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

― flamenco drop (BradNelson),

I'm pretty sure this album was not recorded with protools. protools had been out for a few years but wasn't Kid A the first bit album to be totally recorded in protools some years later?

big album, not bit.

ProTools was in its infancy in 1994, 16 inputs perhaps.

The internet says Outside was recorded on two 48-track machines, but I'm not sure that's correct either, perhaps it was Mitsubishi 32-track digital recorders.

i'd be surprised if there wasn't some digital recording involved

Digital editing of mixes and takes, certainly

btw saw an announcement that the albums from this last box set (including Outside) are finally being released on vinyl independently from the box, next month I think

I'm pretty sure this album was not recorded with protools. protools had been out for a few years but wasn't Kid A the first bit album to be totally recorded in protools some years later?

If I'm not mistaken, the Beach Boys album "Summer In Paradise" (1992) has this distinction.

"Digital recording" includes ADATs and DA-88s and what have you so certainly some of it was involved. Could also involve RADAR, which is arguably classifiable as a DAW (albeit with no independent computer).

Logic and ProTools were used in conjunction with linear recording tech (i.e. reel-to-reel and its descendants) for editing and sampling and MIDI and sync and processing and what have you. I absolutely think Eno was using Logic on Outside, but in conjunction with other recording tech, Logic likely being used for sampling and/or controlling samplers and so on

still never heard this one

Love Outside. For some reason, it was the most-loved Bowie album among my friends in high school (early 2000's) - I think that came from the Nine Inch Nails connections.

"Out of interest, what is 'Peak ProTools' production?"

I think of a certain kind of big-budget, fussily-produced album from the 1990s, when studios gravitated to ProTools - which was very expensive, and initially required specialised hardware, so the smaller acts didn't have a chance to really exploit it. It allowed producers to edit audio down to the individual sample level and move chunks of audio around. That could be done with samplers and sequencers, but it was a lot easier to go completely wild with ProTools because it was drag-and-drop. There's a certain type of album from that period where the production is objectively excellent, with every individual note and sound sample lovingly crafted, but it's too fussy for my taste. Once the novelty wore off producers toned things down.

Avid has an interesting list here, which makes me realise that Outside (and Zooropa, Amused to Death, Tubular Bells 2, The Division Bell etc) were probably pre-ProTools:
http://www.avidblogs.com/7-seminal-records-made-with-pro-tools/

But apparently its ancestor, Sound Tools, was released in 1989, and my hunch is that Brian Eno was the kind of man who would buy things on day one of release - he probably spent a lot of time on the phone to DigiDesign's customer service department - so dating things is hard. Sound Tools worked on the late Motorola 68K Macintoshes.

The first example they give is Garbage's debut album, from 1995. The silent chop-out in "Supervixen" could have been done by any number of methods, but with ProTools all Butch Vig had to do was highlight that chunk of sample -> insert silence -> maybe fade out/fade in the edges and voila. And from that point onwards it would have been a simple matter to cut out all extraneous ambient sounds, make reverb tails stop dead, apply reverb to individual guitar notes, and do it at lighting speed, without having to ride a mixing desk or edit tape. Avid's article links to this interview from 1999 with a chap who engineered Bjork's Homogenic:
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/spike-stent

"What I also enjoyed with that Björk album was that there were no definite arrangements on most of the songs. I'm talking about the way the beats came in and out, where certain hooks were, and so on. A lot of that was created during the mix. They brought the material in on analogue tape and DA98, and a few things that were run live. We moved many things around in Pro Tools. I would start at 10 in the morning, and by four in the afternoon Björk would come in and give me feedback. I had a lot of freedom. I did drop-ins and cuts and rearranged things, and could go wild with my effects. Just like with the Massive Attack albums, Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1998) — I got to use many guitar effects pedals. I used them on the breaks, vocals, keyboards, all sorts of things. Björk and her producer Mark Bell had already manipulated the sounds a lot, and then I manipulated them again."

It's also fascinating for the casual mention of Auto-Tune in its original context as a way of correcting bum notes, because "Believe" was only a year old at that point.

I'm digressing wildly but essentially my thesis is that Outside sounds over-engineered, as if Bowie had just realised he could edit literally everything in close to real time.

Eno wanted the record to be a lot sparser.

"Sparse" is not a word I typically associate with Brian Eno.

He's notorious for erasing contentious individual tracks to circumvent mix-related arguments.

XXP - I thought that's what you were leaning toward.

While I agree that digital audio production enables those tempted to go all in with overdubs and on-grid tendencies, I can't get behind the idea of ProTools as the sole pejorative culprit.

I do see PT used as a worrisome adverb from time to time, and while it shouldn't, it kinda bugs me, perhaps because I sit in front of it every day.

The irony is, of all the DAWs and standalone digital recording systems I've used over the years (since around the same time Outside was being recorded, funnily enough) it is easily one of the most 'tape-like' of all.

People like Steve Lipson and Trevor Horn were achieving the same over-the-top results 10 years previously with Fariights and Synclaviers, it just took much longer and required a more mathematical mindset.